Requirements for enabling surveillance of electronic communications have been enacted into public law (e.g., Public Law 103-414 enacted Oct. 25, 1994; CALEA Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act) reciting requirements for assuring law enforcement access to electronic communications. Such access is required to be in real time, have full time monitoring capabilities, simultaneous intercepts, and feature service descriptions. The requirements specifically include capacity requirements and function capability. It is incumbent upon communication carriers to provide such capability and capacity.
While initially limited in scope, at present, to certain communications technology it is almost assured that it will be extended to new forms of communication. New technologies require extension of CALEA to the new phone system technologies. With the advent of IP telephony it is desirable to provide surveillance capabilities for application to IP telephony.
One of the impediments to surveillance is the necessity of having dedicated equipment to perform the monitoring function. It would be useful to perform such surveillance of a targeted phone with non-dedicated telephone equipment. With use of such non-dedicated equipment it is desirable to distinguish normal calls from surveillance calls.